Mari Tilos has posted a few additional screencasts on our screencast wiki page. You can read and post your feedback on the forum topic here. If you have any ideas or suggestions for additional screencasts, please do post a comment on the forum topic
Blogs
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Zoey Kroll from CivicActions has volunteered to help us with usability issues. We've decided to focus on a few common CiviCRM screens to begin with. You can read more details on Zoey's blog post here. Please post your responses and feedback on our forum topic dedicated to this issue here.
Thanks to the awesome folks over at the Joomla! project, CiviCRM will have a few projects in Google's Summer of Code this year.
You can see the list of proposed project ideas here: http://docs.joomla.org/Summer_of_Code_2008_Project_Ideas#CiviCRM_Projects
The biggest thing we need now are students to apply!
Here are the top 3 reasons why you (or a student you know) should work on CiviCRM this summer:
We monitor the forums quite a bit and are always trying to figure out how to reduce / minimize the repeated requests. Many a time my strong stance on refusing to fix something obvious delays a few fixes (yes, i'm learning all the time and hopefully improving and becoming a wee bit wiser). I got a bit tired and fed up of seeing the same requests over and over again, so earlier today I went on a spree and fixed (or attempted to fix) a few of the most common support requests or mistakes.
Day 1: Technically, day 1 was a fabulous dinner hosted by CiviCRM at Herbsaint in the warehouse district of New Orleans. This is Susan Spicer's restaurant, and it was delicious -- they even made the vegetarian (me) a special-not-on-the-menu meal! We took this time to get to know each other and talk a bit about CiviCRM, what we liked/disliked, and the development community in general.
Meeting folks who use and implement CiviCRM - face to face - is stimulating, challenging and just plain fun. I spent last week in New Orleans at our Boot Camp, at NTEN's NTC and at Penguin Day - and came home tired, a few pounds heavier (good eats in NOLA), and vowing to make these opportunities happen more often!
NTEN Affinity Group
Thanks to Judy Hallman's hard work and useful "pushing" - there were two specific CiviCRM events at NTC - an "Affinity Group" and a lunch "Discussion Table". The Affinity Group was well attended - especially given that it overlapped with NTEN's Day of Service and before many folks had arrived for the main conference. There was a good mix of folks from non-profits of various sizes and types, a few integrators and several folks who work for other eCRM platforms. However, none of the attendees were actual users - and the planned agenda was focussed on user sharing and Q & A. We did a quick re-boot and managed to give folks an overview of CiviCRM features.
Several people expressed doubts about using an open source solution for their organization (one person even using the phrase "deathly afraid"). They raised particular concerns about support ("who do I call when something goes wrong") and technical resources required for installation, configuration and maintenance. As options for paid support become more available, and the ecosystem of solution providers grows - these concerns should diminish. However, for many organizations a fully hosted (ASP) solution is the only realistic answer.
A highlight of the meeting was Greg Heller's "show and tell" of several CivicActions CiviCRM implementations. Seeing CiviCRM "in action" really helps folks understand some of the power of the platform and the advantages of tight integration with a CMS like Drupal. John Kenyon also spent a few minutes describing his training sessions for organizations using or preparing to use CiviCRM.
Thanx to Elin Waring, we had two of Joomla core developers, Rob and Louis, attend the CiviCRM training in New Orleans. We had a pretty diverse CiviCRM crowd attend the training and hence could not work as much as we'd like on improving the CiviCRM Joomla integration. However, I did spend some time with Rob and got a few ideas on how to improve and optimize our Joomla integration. Here are a few things we plan on doing in v2.1 to better support Joomla v1.5
For April 20th and 21st. The session is already sold out. However if there is more interest, we can schedule another training (in Sydney?) and/or get another developer to help with this training. Please contact us immediately if interested.
A minor typo in a php file managed to squeeze its way into the release (CRM/ACL/BAO/ACL.php, line 799 or so there is an extra 'x')
So we've released CiviCRM v2.0.1. We took the opportunity to fix a few other minor issues. We expect to do bug fix releases every other week for the next few months.
After more than 6 months of design, development and QA - the team is thrilled to announce the release of CiviCRM 2.0 Stable. You can download the release AND / OR try it out on our demo sites.
2.0 features significant code and schema changes to improve performance and scalability - as well as a number of exciting new features. You can find Release Highlights here, and check out the resolved issues listing for details on the 450+ improvements and bug fixes.
A big round of applause is due to all the folks who downloaded, tested and submitted bug reports during the 2.0 release cycle. The alpha and beta packages were downloaded more than 3,200 times - and our new ping-back mechanism reported 450+ unique installations. 100+ bugs were reported by community members and fixed by the team during the release cycle. This is a huge increase and improvement in community participation in bullet-proofing a release - and should help make this a high quality release. However, given the complexity of the architecture and schema changes - we do anticipate that a few more issues will arise during the coming weeks. We plan on doing periodic bug fix releases every few weeks as needed.
